TRANSFEMINISM NEEDS A THEORY OF DESIRE.
Transfeminism has developed an extensive language for explaining how society shapes gender, yet our analysis often becomes strangely hesitant once the conversation reaches desire.
We understand femininity as something formed within history and culture. We study how race and class affect beauty standards, how media changes our understanding of bodies, and how social conditions influence which expressions of gender receive recognition. These forces also participate in the formation of desire. Saying that people like what they like does very little to explain why millions of supposedly private preferences form recognizable social patterns.
This becomes particularly obvious within transfeminine sexual culture. Certain bodies receive more attention. Race affects desirability. Sexual roles become associated with particular presentations of femininity. Some trans women are readily imagined as romantic partners while others encounter a culture that approaches them primarily through sexual curiosity. Relationship structures can acquire social prestige within individual queer scenes until participation begins carrying meanings far beyond the relationships themselves.
None of these patterns require us to put individual attraction on trial. Feminism has always been capable of studying aggregate behavior while recognizing individual agency.
A woman can genuinely desire someone while living in a society that helped teach her what desirability looks like. A trans woman can freely choose a sexual role while existing within a culture that attaches meanings to that role. Someone can enthusiastically enter a relationship structure whose popularity was influenced by the community surrounding them.
Agency continues to exist within social formation because agency has never required isolation from social influence.
Consent gives us essential information about whether people agreed to an encounter and respected one another’s boundaries. A broader sexual ethics still has to explain the patterns surrounding those encounters. We should be able to ask why particular people repeatedly become desirable, why others become disposable, how sexual expectations develop, and what happens when thousands of individual choices begin producing the same outcomes.
Feminism already asks these questions about heterosexuality. We have spent generations studying how patriarchy influences heterosexual courtship, marriage, beauty, sex, and domestic life while continuing to recognize women’s capacity to make meaningful choices within those conditions.
Transfeminine relationships deserve the same level of analysis.
Our desires belong to us, and they were formed while we were living among other people.
A transfeminist theory of desire should begin there.
